Monday, February 6, 2012

Clint Eastwood as Dumb Propagandist

Talking heads and bloggers are gaga over Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler. Msnbc.com users even said it was the best of the the Super Bowl.

I think the ad was a pile of propaganda, with Eastwood likely too dumb to understand what it was about. Throw Eastwood in the Ronald Reagan category, prop either of them up and they will say anything, and look good saying it. But the deep underlying message is that we all "need to come together" to fix things. Bull.

The problem is not that America has been hit by some outside punch. America has been hit by massive government intervention that distorts the economy and creates massive business cycle waves.

What's really going on in America would be the same as if during the Super Bowl game between the Giants and the Patriots, the referees were changing the rules of the game, as it went along, to favor one team or the other, depending on who lobbied the referees the most.

We are not at some mythical "half-time in America", we are facing growing intervention and interference by government. It is suffocating the country. The solution is not to draw up some new half-time game plan, but to return to the plan that made America great. The of freedom, where regulations hardly existed and Americans minded their own business and, especially, stayed out of the affairs in foreign lands.

To the degree Detroit's auto industry is alive today, in the form it is, is because of a bailout that benefited the unions and cost taxpayers billions. There was nothing free market about it. It was both an absurd and appropriate place as a backdrop for Eastwood to give his confused soliloquy.

Allow me to be the first to predict a new Youtube meme mocking this commercial. As awful as this ad was, and as disappointing as it was to see Clint sell out to do it, I AM looking forward to seeing several hundred parodies emerge very soon. I can see it now... "It's 4th and long, America, and there's only 5 seconds left. We've got one play left...we're going with 'the statue of liberty.'"

First off, I really like Clint Eastwood - that being said, who's to say, we wouldn't have been better off if Detroit's auto assets had gone into bankruptcy? The assets could have been taken over by companies, American perhaps, that would have been able to draw up new negotiations with unions from the get go. While the biggest contributor the business cycle is the Federal Reserve / fractional reserve banking, the government propping up individual industries certainly does not promote the sort of dynamic economy the Joseph Schumpeter talked about when he used the phrase "creative destruction."

How can you mock this commercial? It's self-mocking already. Halftime in America????? WTF??? We're all sitting on our asses in a locker room with coach Obama chewing us out and giving us bogus strategies so we can lose the second half???? I was laughing my ass off.

Other commercials were part of that category of mainstream propaganda. There's a commercial criticizing Verizon for outsourcing work. Mainstream america is still being hit hard by false truths, like companies outsource workers to hurt the US. I don't really care that it was Clint Eastwood-I still admire him as an actor; the force driving the message is far more important. The pattern is that these commercials tap patriotism for one's country (US), and imply that we should be supporting the current regime and national strategy (Obama). The truth is that the economy is all too conveniently doing well after massive QE, and that government intervention is most likely what kept our economy in a depression. Yet these commercials are disturbing because they seek to brainwash the masses. Reminds me of the sort of stuff you'd see in a communist country. I suppose the positive side is it could make people (not the smarter EPJ readers and elsewhere) happier to live here...